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African, American

The Alexandrian exile André Aciman used to linger in a tatty Upper West Side park just for the bittersweet pleasure of shadowing his surroundings with images from cities he’d known and lost, remaking the architecture of the present, as he put it, “so as not to write off the past.” Dinaw Mengestu’s first novel is a tale of just such a shadowing of two cities — Washington, where the narrator, Sepha Stephanos, lives in exile, and Addis Ababa, his city of memory and violent expulsion. As Stephanos wanders the half-known, half-remembered roads of America’s capital, he finds himself drawn into conversation with his dead father, murdered before his eyes during Ethiopia’s Red Terror.

“The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” is about the animate presence of loss, about a man struggling to find traction in his ostensibly current life as proprietor of an ailing Logan Circle grocery store. Almost every page reminds us that “departure” and “arrival” are deceptively decisive words. Airport terminals, passenger lounges and customs posts cement the illusion that we know when we’re coming and going. Stephanos knows better. It has been almost 17 years since he fled his country’s revolution and fetched up in Washington, but in no simple sense can he be said to have arrived. “How was I supposed to live in America,” he exclaims, “when I had never really left Ethiopia?”

Stephanos has, however, lived in America long enough to collect a few aphorisms to survive by: “Never trust anyone who says ‘Trust me.’ Try to find high places to look down from.” And he has moved up from his first job as a hotel bellhop. (“My arms and legs were numb from 13 hours of lifting luggage and bending at every moment to someone else’s needs. ... I couldn’t believe that my father had died and I had been spared in order to carry luggage in and out of a room.”) But Stephanos’s little store is tilted at a daunting angle to the official American dream.

The deeply felt pain in Mengestu’s novel is offset by the solace of friendship — whether it’s a friendship that hovers on the verge of romance, a friendship between an adult and a child or, above all, the friendships that steady the daily lives of fellow immigrants. Mengestu brilliantly summons up the tribe Maeve Brennan once called “travelers in residence” — men and women suspended between continents; suspended, too, between memory and forgetting.

Stephanos and his great confidants, Congo Joe and Ken the Kenyan, first met as hotel workers shortly after their expulsion from Africa. Ken has ascended to the rank of engineer; Joe remains stuck waiting tables in a downtown restaurant. Their friendship is anchored by ritual observances: a particular bar, a particular jukebox song, a particular sequence of quips. This band of brothers likes to gather after hours in the back of Stephanos’s store, where they down Johnnie Walker Black from styrofoam cups and play their memory game: name an African dictator, then recall the country and the year he seized power. Bukassa. Mobutu. Amin. They have memorized the details of some 30 African coups. When the coups stop, Joe declares, so will their game.

Mengestu has a fine ear for the way immigrants from damaged places talk in the sanctuary of their own company, free from the exhausting courtesies of self-anthropologizing explanation. He gets, pitch perfect, the warmly abrasive wit of the violently displaced and their need to keep alive some textured memories — even memories that wound — amid America’s demanding amnesia. Mengestu understands the threats these men face, not least the threat of expectations. Ken can finally afford to buy himself some dental work that would help him assimilate upward, but he chooses not to: “ ‘You can never forget where you came from if you have teeth as ugly as these,’ he said. He grinned once more. He tapped a slightly brown front tooth for effect.”

What more potent setting is there than Washington for a novel about the architecture of hope and memory? As Stephanos wanders, Bloom-like, down back streets and broad avenues, he takes in both the neglected statuary that attempts to do the official work of remembrance and the anonymous heroisms of ordinary people, unnoticed by anyone but a neighbor or a storekeeper or a child. Mengestu also widens his canvas by giving the novel a romantic turn, reviving an old plot device: a stranger comes to town. The stranger in question is a white American woman, Judith McMasterson. “Before Judith, these were the only reasons white people had ever come into the neighborhood: to deliver official notices, investigate crimes and check up on the children of negligent parents.”

Judith starts to renovate the house next door to Stephanos’s store and so becomes one of the harbingers of an “urban renewal” fiercely resisted by the community. But she’s also a harbinger of more personal change, as Stephanos feels a growing affection for her and her daughter, 11-year-old Naomi, the child of Judith’s severed marriage to a Mauritanian economist. Naomi floods Stephanos’s tawdry life with light, laughter and energy.

It’s rare that a novelist who can comfortably take on knotty political subjects like exile, memory and class conflict is also able to write with wisdom, wit and tenderness about the frisson of romance. Mengestu skillfully sketches the precarious attraction between Stephanos and Judith, but his portrait of the bond between Stephanos and Naomi is even more extraordinary. In our culture’s rigid judgment, a friendship between an 11-year-old girl and a 36-year-old man is creepy by default. The bravest thing about Mengestu’s novel is the way he pours such deep, nonsexual yearning into this relationship, which is life-saving for Stephanos and Naomi alike.

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Both impassioned readers, they fall into the habit of reading aloud together. Among Naomi’s favorites is “The Brothers Karamazov” — because, as Judith explains to Stephanos, it’s the sort of book that will keep Stephanos reading to her for hours. He makes his way through the brothers’ story with all the drama he can summon: “This was exactly what my father would have done. ... He would have made the story an event, as grand and real as life.” What we see is a man reading to a little girl. But — and Mengestu is too subtle a writer to declare this outright — what we also see is a ceremony of reading shared by two children of vanished fathers who, although years apart in age, have learned to use books to hold off, if only temporarily, the acknowledgment of loss.

“The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears” takes us effortlessly through impressive changes of theme and mood. On one page, we’re listening to Stephanos gently observing that “sometimes while I read, Naomi would lay her head against my arm or in my lap and rest there, wide awake and attentive, until forced to move. It was just enough to make me see how one could want so much more out of life.” Elsewhere, just as sharply rendered, Joe sarcastically re-enacts an evening waiting tables at a restaurant where senators and congressmen gather: “It was terrible at the Colony today. Absolutely terrible. The natives went crazy. We ran out of the risotto. The women were tearing off their pearls. The men were spitting in their wine. We almost had to tear gas the place.”

Saul Bellow shadows these pages: the dangling men, the urban wanderings, the uncle who writes obsessive letters to the authorities. Above all, Mengestu shares Bellow’s genius for the quick, decisive physical portrait — what Brent Staples once described as Bellow’s gift for making “the folds in a bald man’s head seem like a window on the soul.” Yet Mengestu uses this talent to open up a wider, more diverse neighborhood of empathies.

Again and again, Stephanos’s story makes us consider what it means to be displaced: from a local community, from a distant nation, from a love you had hoped to settle into. In Mengestu’s work, there’s no such thing as the nondescript life. He notices, and there are whole worlds in his noticing. He has written a novel for an age ravaged by the moral and military fallout of cross-cultural incuriosity. In a society slick with “truthiness” — and Washington may be the capital of that — there’s something hugely hopeful about this young writer’s watchful honesty and egalitarian tenderness. This is a great African novel, a great Washington novel and a great American novel.

Rob Nixon is the Rachel Carson professor of English at the University of Wisconsin.